Collections: arx

Since the arrival of the first class of students at Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1867, the student body at UMass has grown to over 20,500 undergraduates and nearly 6,000 graduate students.

Record Group 45 includes the collected records of student activities at UMass Amherst, from student publications and organizations (fraternities and sororities, unions, and honorary societies) to records of student government, student protests, and religious and social groups. Also included are class notes and correspondence of some individual students while enrolled in the University.

A number of student publications have been digitized and are indexed in YouMass.

Since almost the time of first arrival of students at Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1867, the college’s students have taken an active role in publishing items for their own consumption. Beginning with the appearance of the first yearbook, put together by the pioneer class during their junior year in 1870 and followed by publication of the first, short-lived newspaper, The College Monthly in 1887, students have been responsible for dozens of publications from literature to humor to a range of politically- and socially-oriented periodicals.
This series consists of the collected student publications from Massachusetts Agricultural College, Massachusetts State College, and UMass Amherst, including student newspapers, magazines, newsletters, inserts, yearbooks, and songbooks. Publications range from official publications emanating from the student body to unofficial works by student interest groups or academic departments. Links to digitized versions of the periodicals are supplied when available.

SCUA holds a nearly complete run of undergraduate honors theses, arranged chronologically by year and then alphabetically by author. A small selection of honors theses are available to view online at university’s institutional repository’s CHC Theses and Projects page. Honors theses can be viewed on site in the Special Collections and University Archives reading room. Starting in 2019, all undergraduate honors theses are submitted electronically.

• Paper honors theses (pre-2019) may take up to one to two business days to retrieve.
• Digital honors theses (2019 forward) must also be viewed on site in SCUA’s reading room, but they do not have a delay period from request to retrieval and access.

A spreadsheet list of honors theses can be consulted online. Email SCUA with your requests in advance of visiting. Please include the year, author’s full name, and the title for each thesis requested.

Masters theses and dissertations written by UMass Amherst students are not a part of the University Archives, but most are available in electronic form through the university’s institutional repository, ScholarWorks.

Established under the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1863, the Massachusetts Agricultural College began with four faculty members and 56 students distributed among four wooden buildings and acres of farms, orchards, and fields. In keeping with the progressive educational principles of its early years, the College offered advanced instruction in the eminently practical pursuit of agriculture, while its fellow land grant college, MIT, covered the mechanical arts. Although “Mass Aggie’s” fortunes waxed and waned, it grew to become Massachusetts State College in 1931, and the University of Massachusetts in 1947.

Among the official publications of the University in Record Group 1 are institutional histories, annual reports, special reports, minutes, directories, catalogs, newsclippings, press releases, and memorabilia.

Helping to fulfill its land grant mission, outreach at UMass Amherst engages the university with the community in economic, social, cultural, environmental, and educational issues. Outreach applies the teaching, research, and knowledge resources of the university with benefit to the public throughout the Commonwealth, nation, and world. The office operates a number of programs, including Continuing & Professional Education, the Extension and Arts Extension Service, the University Without Walls, and WFCR radio.

The records of University Outreach document the initiatives originating with the Vice Chancellor for University Outreach. As a result of the evolution of responsibility for outreach activities, the records of individual programs may be located elsewhere in the archives.

In 1955, the Literary Society of the University of Massachusetts and Professor H. Leland Varley received a grant of $5,800 from the Educational Television and Radio Center to produce a series of one-hour radio programs centered on a discussion of the impact of eight major American novelists from a European perspective. The subjects included Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck (who replaced the original choice, John Marquand).

The collection is comprised of administrative documents, transcripts, and sound recordings relating to the Literary Society radio program, ‘As others see us.’ Moderated by a member of the UMass Department of English, each broadcast featured discussions by distinguished literary critics such as W.H. Auden, R.P. Blackmur, Perry Miller, Maxwell Geismar, and Renato Poggioli. Dos Passos, Faulkner, and Steinbeck participated in person. Also included is a related item from an earlier program sponsored by the Literary Society: E.E. Cummings reading Twelve Poems.

When Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew incorporated the Board of Trustees for the Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1863, the fourteen members of the board were charged with creating a new agricultural college. Since that time, the Board of Trustees (including student trustees) had governed the University, meeting regularly to act on University-wide matters of policy, mission, finance, and campus maintenance. Governance responsibilities in some areas (e.g., tuition, academic program review and approval) are shared with the statewide Board of Higher Education. The Board of Trustees maintains a Chair and six standing committees: Executive, Administration and Finance, Academic and Student Affairs, Athletics, Audit, and External Affairs. The President and the Five College Chancellors administer board policy.
The bulk of the Board of Trustees records consists of meeting minutes (1906-2007) and Trustee Documents (1963-2007), along with the papers of a small number of individual trustees and the records of the Trustees’ “Commission on the Future of the University of Massachusetts” (1988-1989), which resulted in the consolidation of the state’s five public university campuses under a single President and Board of Trustees. In partnership with the Board of Trustees, SCUA has digitized the complete minutes of the Board from chartering of the university in 1863 through 2004.

View the digitized minutes

An alumnus of both the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Boston College, Victor Aronow was involved with the anti-draft and anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, and the movement against U.S. involvement in Central America. Aronow was also involved with socialist, anarchist, and other leftist movements and organizations. Some of these organizations include the United States Socialist Labor Party, the Peace and Freedom Party, and the New America Movement. Most of his activism was focused in Massachusetts, but he also engaged with organizations that offered support to Central American movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Aronow practiced law, serving as defense counsel for Arthur Montour also called Kakwirakeron in U.S. vs. Kakwirakeron, as well as a member of the Wounded Knee Legal Defense team.

Aronow’s collection consists of a series of subject files containing magazines, books, leaflets, correspondence, clippings, newspapers, and fliers from a range of national and international leftist organizations. Aronow was a member of The Boston Draft Resistance Group, Newton Draft Counseling Center, and the American Friends Service Committee. As a member, Aronow collected files from these groups including correspondence, publications, meeting minutes, newspaper clippings, and his personal notes. While practicing law, Aronow gathered court records for cases he worked on, including both his work as a member of the Wounded Knee Legal Defense team, where he worked defending the rights of the Oglala Sioux tribe members who were involved in the attempted liberation of Wounded Knee in 1973, as well as a member of the defense counsel in U.S. vs. Kakwirakeron in 1990. The collection contains files gathered from multiple trials related to Wounded Knee including correspondence between lawyers and defendants, court records and legal filings, newsletters, press releases, funding appeals, and fliers.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

Born in New York City in 1920 on the day his Russian immigrant parents first set foot in the United States, Meyer Weinberg was a political radical, civil rights activist, and a distinguished scholar of desegregation in education. Working his way through the University of Chicago, receiving both a BA (1942) and MA (1945), Weinberg began his career at Wright Junior College, where he harnessed his zeal for social justice to the problem of integration in Chicago’s schools. Active in the civil rights movement, he became a key figure in providing data for desegregation efforts nationally, serving as Chair of the Education Committee of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) from 1963 to 1967, and as an expert witness in numerous desegregation cases. After moving to City College in Chicago (1971) and then Northwestern (1972-1978), he accepted a faculty appointment at UMass Amherst in the School of Education (and later in Afro-American Studies), also working as Director of the Horace Mann Bond Center for Equal Education (1978-1992). Weinberg’s eighteenth book, A Short History of American Capitalism, appeared just before his death on Feb. 28, 2002.

A large and varied collection, the Weinberg Papers document both the academic and political commitments of Meyer Weinberg from the late 1940s until his retirement from UMass. The focus throughout is his interest in school desegregation, particularly in his native Chicago, but the collection extends to other areas in civil rights activism.

Unidentified DJ in the WMUA master control room, ca. 1985

WMUA is UMass’ student/community run non-commercial FM radio station. In continuous operation since 1948, initially as an AM station, it serves the campus and surrounding communities in the Pioneer Valley and can be heard from the Connecticut to the Vermont border. Beginning in 1948, as students were first establishing the station, WMUA has been a constant presence on campus, weathering budget cuts, leadership upheavals and the rise and fall of radio as a dominant medium.

The records of WMUA document the history of a particularly long-lived organization at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst and reflect the changing culture of the campus. In addition to some administrative and financial records, the collection includes a number of promotional materials, newsclippings, photographs and recordings that reflect the history of the organization. Also noteworthy is a history of WMUA written in 1963 to commemorate its 15th anniversary as well as several oral histories with station alum from different eras. There are also press clippings, ephemera, press releases and recordings from the acclaimed Magic Triangle Jazz Series.

Additionally, there are hundreds of analog and digital recordings of shows that span three decades of the station’s history, with the bulk from 1987-2012. A separate, growing, inventory of the recordings is also available which includes descriptions, dates, and formats of the recordings.